The use of electronic transactions over public networks such as the Internet has greatly increased over the past decade. Each electronic transaction taking place over the Internet runs the risk of exposing personally identifiable information (PII) to unwanted third parties.
Conventional systems for carrying out electronic transactions over the Internet use software embedded within a browser and running on a script written in a scripting language for which the browser has an interpreter. The scripting language interpreter in modern browsers is typically a Javascript interpreter.
An example of software for conducting electronic transactions which runs in a browser is a banking application from which a user on a computer wishes to transfer funds from one account to another within a banking institution. Besides allowing for the user to enter PII such as account numbers and identifying information such as passwords, the software may also collect several data elements on the user's computer, the data elements indicating, for example, a Trojan infection which could compromise the user's PII.